Down right Mad!!!

[ShadowChemosh]

Attached is a sample character sheet from one of my players characters. I just used a free windows program called PrimoPDF to print to a PDF instead of a real printer.

[daplunk]

I think that's just an extension of the HLC history. They sold extra licenses and so many people have purchased them that they want to offer some value to the people that transfer over.

I just hope they update their terms and agreements to allow the DM to purchase the licenses and share with their table. That just makes sense given a lot of DMs will purchase the technology they want their players to use at their table.

[BJ]

While I have no firm answers for you at the moment, we are currently discussing group licensing and how we might handle it. If we do implement it, it will be down the road a ways.

[BJ]

I absolutely understand your frustration Zarberg! You can learn more about what happened on Tuesday here.

While this was an isolated incident, once we get offline view properly implemented it should help eliminate some of the frustration for maintenance times. Also, be sure to keep an eye on our announcements area as we do post when we will be doing our scheduled maintenance.

[Jamz]

As you guys move more and more into the "Online" model, I hope you guys grow and learn. Hopefully we'll start hearing words like Load Balancing, Disaster Recovery, and Multi-site High Availability.

I don't necessarily mind monthly "server" fees but in this day and age, I don't want to hear about maintenance windows. We're spoiled now and 0 downtime is somewhat expected.

I know this was a one off with your provider but still "avoidable".

PS Please don't take this as an angry post, I'm not. Read this as a friendly post as encouragement and hope that your experience will be growing over the next year as you manage your 24/7 server farm.

[EightBitz]

Originally Posted by Jamz

As you guys move more and more into the "Online" model, I hope you guys grow and learn. Hopefully we'll start hearing words like Load Balancing, Disaster Recovery, and Multi-site High Availability.

I don't necessarily mind monthly "server" fees but in this day and age, I don't want to hear about maintenance windows. We're spoiled now and 0 downtime is somewhat expected.

I know this was a one off with your provider but still "avoidable".

PS Please don't take this as an angry post, I'm not. Read this as a friendly post as encouragement and hope that your experience will be growing over the next year as you manage your 24/7 server farm.

Even with load-balancing and high-availability, up-time is guaranteed up to a certain number of nines. Let's say it's five nines, 99.999% up-time. There's still a 0.001% chance of things going down.

Disaster recovery, if we're separating that out from multi-site high-availability, have recovery-point and recovery-time parameters, meaning that things won't necessarily be back up instantly, and won't necessarily be back up with up-to-the-second data, or even up-to-the-minute.

This shouldn't have happened. They've admitted that. They've isolated the issue. They've addressed it.

[Farling]

Originally Posted by EightBitz

Let's say it's five nines, 99.999% up-time. There's still a 0.001% chance of things going down.

Down for less than 1 hour per year requires a reliability of 0.0114155%

It would be down for longer due to periodic program updates.

[jlong05]

Originally Posted by Farling

Down for less than 1 hour per year requires a reliability of 0.0114155%

It would be down for longer due to periodic program updates.

Planned, scheduled maintenance isn't considered downtime when tracking a KPI though. So program updates done during that maintenance is ok.

Lets be honest here guys. Every online company does maintenance and far more business that Wolflair ever will be. I don't see people screaming when MS, Apple, Amazon, etc are running their planned maintenance, so why would anyone EVER expect Wolflair to maintain a five-9 stability rating.

If your gaming group can't accommodate planned maintenance, I think you all need to get out more.

[Farling]

Originally Posted by jlong05

If your gaming group can't accommodate planned maintenance, I think you all need to get out more.

When the planned maintenance coincides with your regular weekly gaming session (which you might have been doing for the past 30 years) then you have no character sheets for that game session.

(Just check out the RW mandatory updates which are published just prior to a gaming session as reported in other forums to see what a hassle it causes.)

[MNBlockHead]

Originally Posted by jlong05

If your gaming group can't accommodate planned maintenance, I think you all need to get out more.

Well, yes, sure. But this is all a bit of a tangent from the far more common issue of poor or no connections at game stores, conventions, and homes.

I love "cloud"-based tools and don't mind paying subscriptions for services and software. But anything important needs to have offline.

I run my business on G Suite. I have offline access to critical documents.

Other services I use include:

Evernote - I can use on or offline and on multiple platforms.

DnD Beyond - On iOS devices, all my rules, and adventure content is available offline. The character sheet will be after they've revamped the online version.

Apple Music

Podcasts (I just use the default one on the iPhone but afaik all the major podcast applications support downloading for offline consumption)

My task-management service

Actually, the more that I think about it, the harder it is to think of online services I use that DON'T have offline capabilities.

About the only thing that comes readily to mind for fully online is streaming video services like Amazon TV, HBO Now, Netflix, and Hulu.